In 1966 the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in a taut nuclear cat-and-mouse game. The U.S. Air Force's Strategic Air Command kept an arsenal of missiles and aircraft on a constant state of alert. Decades before the term 24/7 was invented, SAC embodied it with airborne patrols—under code names like Looking Glass and Chrome Dome—flown respectively by command-and-control aircraft and nuclear-armed bombers.
A mind-boggling array of measures and protocols were in place to control this airborne armada. Yet, even with all the safeguards in place, accidents—to be exact, 20—happened between 1950 and 1966 involving Air Force aircraft with nuclear weapons on board.1 Perhaps the most serious occurred in 1966 over Spain when a B-52 Stratofortress exploded while carrying four nuclear weapons. Three bombs were located almost immediately, but the fourth could not be found. What began as an Air Force tragedy rapidly developed into a Navy search-and-recovery operation distinguished by resourcefulness, perseverance, and sacrifice.
At dawn on 16 January 1966, an eight-engine B-52G, call sign Tea 16, lifted off from Seymour Johnson Air Force Base, North Carolina. On a Chrome Dome mission with another B-52, the aircraft was carrying four B28FI thermonuclear bombs. The pair was bound for the coast of Spain where they would refuel before heading over the Mediterranean. After then passing close to the Soviet border with Turkey, they would reverse course. The round-trip was scheduled for 26 hours. The flight to Turkey was uneventful and the aircraft were on their way home when the time arrived for a routine refueling from a pair of KC-135 Stratotankers over Spain. Afterward would be the remaining seven-hour flight back to North Carolina.
Tea 16's 29-year-old aircraft commander, Captain Charles J. Wendorf, had logged 2,100 flying hours in B-52s but was not at the controls as the bomber approached the tanker. Instead, he was in the right seat, while Major Larry G. Messinger, a crusty staff pilot, flew from the pilot's seat. Messinger had been in the service long enough to view Germany through the bombsight of a B-17 in World War II. Although a seasoned pilot, Messinger closed too quickly on the tanker—call sign Troubadour 14—and there was no time for a last moment correction. The tanker's flying boom sliced into Tea 16's fuselage, and in the ensuing explosion, the mighty B-52 broke up in the clear morning sky over the southeastern coast of Spain near Palomares. Within hours the little agricultural, fishing, and tourist village in Almer
a province would be the focus of world attention.Mayhem at 31,000 Feet
In the chaos of the midair collision, only four of the seven bomber crew members were able to escape. Messinger and Wendorf safely ejected and parachuted into the Mediterranean. Captain Ivens Buchanan, the radar-navigator, was burned as he ejected through the explosion and could not separate from his seat, although his parachute did open. He survived, suffering a back injury from landing in the seat.2 Navigator First Lieutenant Steven G. Montanus also ejected but at a very low altitude and was killed when his chute did not open. The electronic warfare officer, First Lieutenant George J. Glessner, and gunner, Technical Sergeant Ronald P. Snyder, were killed. Both were on Tea 16's upper deck, behind the pilots near the point where the refueling boom penetrated the fuselage. Neither had a chance to eject. Seated in a jump seat centered behind the pilots, the last survivor, copilot First Lieutenant Richard J. Rooney, did not have an ejection seat. He was trapped in the gyrating wreckage as it tumbled through the air until tossed out, just in time to open his parachute. He, like the other two pilots, landed in the Mediterranean and was rescued by local fishermen within an hour.
The KC-135 crew was less fortunate. Troubadour 14 continued forward after the collision, suffered an internal explosion, and pitched down into a steep dive. At 1,600 feet above the ground a massive explosion destroyed it. The entire crew of four—pilot Major Emil J. Chapla, copilot Captain Paul R. Lane, navigator Captain Leo F. Simmons, and boom operator Master Sergeant Lloyd G. Potolicchio—perished.3
The accompanying B-52 and KC-135, along with other aircraft and ships, reported the explosions and burning wreckage to Moron and Torrejon Air Bases in Spain. At Torrejon, the Sixteenth Air Force Commander, Major General Delmar Wilson, was informed of the incident and that four nuclear weapons—their status unknown—were involved. Wilson immediately sent the report to Strategic Air Command Headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base, near Omaha, Nebraska. From there it was flashed to the Pentagon and the White House situation room under the code name Broken Arrow—loss of a nuclear warhead.4
Even as President Lyndon B. Johnson, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the Spanish government were being notified, the Sixteenth Air Force was engaged in a search for survivors and wreckage. Within hours it had located three of the bombs in farm fields near the coast. The high explosives on two had detonated, spreading plutonium dust over several hundred acres. That resulted in more than 1,500 tons of contaminated earth later being transported back to the United States for storage in Aiken, South Carolina.5 The third bomb was found intact; its parachute had deployed as designed and cushioned the impact. The fourth bomb, however, was nowhere to be found, prompting concern that it had landed in the Mediterranean. After a week of searching without results, those concerns were accepted as fact.
In Spain the accident became a hot political issue. The country had been using aircraft basing rights as leverage in soliciting U.S. support to oust the British from Gibraltar. The crash and subsequent nuclear contamination of Spanish soil caused the suspension of all over flights by U.S. nuclear bombers. The belief that the fourth weapon had landed in the sea also raised concerns about contamination and the threat that presented to Spain's flourishing tourist industry. The U.S. ambassador to Spain, Angier Biddle Duke, set about to assuage the fears. A professional statesman and avid swimmer, Duke devised a plan to calm the brewing political storm. In conjunction with an inauguration ceremony at Mojacar, he arranged for the Spanish minister of Information and Tourism, Manuel Fraga, to take a swim with him in the Mediterranean. With full international press coverage on 8 March, the two took a leisurely dip off the Mediterranean seacoast.6 While Spanish political concerns were assuaged, the pressure remained to find the missing bomb and was growing.
The Navy is Called In
The spotlight then shifted to the U.S. Navy to find and recover the B28. John P. Craven was head of the Navy's Deep Submersible Program in January 1966. After service during World War II on the battleship New Mexico (BB-40), he pursued a doctorate in ocean engineering before returning to the Navy as a civilian scientist working in submarine development. On Saturday morning, 22 January, Craven received a call from Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear Matters Jack Howard. He told Craven that a nuclear bomb was lost in the Mediterranean and he needed to find it.7 The Soviets were looking for it as well, so there was no time to lose.
Craven met with a hastily assembled team of mathematicians, submariners, and salvage experts. Using a map of the ocean floor the group determined likely scenarios for how the bomb was lost and combined their findings with Las Vegas-style betting techniques to determine where the bomb was most likely to be found. The process was based on Bayes' Theorem of Subjective Probability, which, in layman terms, allowed for hunches to be blended with mathematical probability.8 Based on their combination of art and science the group believed the bomb was in a deep ravine far from where the plane's wreckage had hit the water.
When shown the results, President Johnson erupted. He demanded that a separate set of scientists and mathematicians look at the problem. The second group concluded that Craven's process was sound and his group's hypothesis was as valid as any other assessment.
In light of Craven's theory on the location of the missing bomb there loomed an earlier report from a Spanish fisherman, Francisco Simo y Orts. He had claimed seeing a crewmember parachute into the water shortly after the planes' collision. Once all the crew had been accounted for, his report was dismissed. When coupled with the predicted location of the bomb, however, the sighting took on new importance. Orts could easily have mistaken the bomb with its deployed parachute for a crew member who had bailed out. Orts' sighting had been investigated on 21 January by the first ships to arrive in the area with any search capability, the minesweepers USS Pinnacle (MSO-462) and USS Sagacity (MSO-469). Their random hunt with hull-mounted sonar had yielded nothing but the fisherman's sighting was enough to move to the next phase, looking underwater. 9
Search Begins
A flotilla of 33 ships designated Task Force 65 and placed under the command of Rear Admiral William S. Guest deployed to the search area designated by Craven.10 Several experimental, deep-diving submersibles—some manned and some remotely controlled—joined the makeshift fleet. Among these was the Alvin, a 23-foot 4-inch submersible with sonar and video capability. Crewed by three and capable of diving to depths of 6,000 feet, the Alvin would prove invaluable in locating the bomb. Also accompanying the search was the Cable-controlled Undersea Recovery Vehicle (CURV) II. It was operated from the surface by means of a tether. Like the Alvin, it had both sonar and closed-circuit television capability, but could only operate to a depth of 2,900 feet.11
In the last week of February, more than a month after the bomb was lost, the Navy launched the Alvin, the first submersible to begin the initial underwater search, based on multiple contacts previously identified by sonar searches. On 1 March the boat was on her tenth dive investigating a large contact with Marvin McCamis, the submersible's chief engineer at her helm.12 She was more than 2,500 feet down before her crew spotted a long furrow on a steep slope unlike any other feature on the local sea bottom. McCamis followed the trench, but the submersible reached her underwater endurance point—8.5 hours—before finding its end. The Alvin had to return to the surface before her batteries ran out.
It took another 12 days to refind the furrow, and once more the submersible had to return to the surface without discovering what was at the far end of the trench. Finally, on 15 March, the Alvin succeeded. There in the murky darkness 2,550 feet below the surface, lying on a very steep 70-degree slope, she found a cylindrical object wrapped in a parachute.13 The missing B28 had been located. All that remained was its retrieval.
Gamble and Success
Over the next ten days the Alvin and another submersible, the Aluminaut, took turns trying to attach lifting lines to the parachute. The weather turned bad, creating undersea currents that began billowing the parachute attached to the bomb. With only one lifting line attached and the threat that the bomb would slide further down the slope, Rear Admiral Guest made the decision to attempt to lift it.
In fading light and heavy seas, the USS Hoist (ARS-40) gingerly hauled in the single nylon line attached to the parachute and bomb. After an hour, the bomb was within 50 feet of the surface. On the deck of the Hoist, prepared to receive the bomb, was Chief Boatswain's Mate Carl Brashear. Brashear was the first African-American master diver in the Navy and the subject of the 2000 movie, Men of Honor. Moored alongside the Hoist was an LCM-8 "Mike boat." A heavy swell pushed the two craft apart and broke a mooring post hurtling it across the deck of the Hoist and almost severing Brashear's leg.14 At the same time the lifting line snapped and the bomb plummeted back into the depths. Brashear would survive after the amputation of his leg and go on to a distinguished career, but the task force had to renew its search.
On 2 April, nine days after the line snapped, the bomb was relocated 120 yards from its original position in 2,800 feet of water. This time the task of attaching the grappling lines fell to the CURV. The plan was to attach three grapnels for extra security, especially since the B28 was perched perilously close to the edge of a deep canyon. Operating near its maximum depth, the remote-controlled submersible succeeded in attaching two grapnels by 6 April. The bomb, however, continued to slowly slide down the slope, threatening to vanish forever into the canyon. In a desperate move, the CURV's operator maneuvered the craft next to the bomb and reversed the thrusters, sucking the parachute into the propellers.15
Shortly after the sun rose over the Mediterranean Sea on 7 April, the USS Petrel (ASR-14) began hoisting the CURV and the attached bomb. At a depth of 50 feet, the weapon was this time securely placed in a bridle by divers and lifted onto the deck. The Petrel then pulled alongside the task force flagship, the USS Albany (CG-10), to allow the press to photograph the event.16
The viewing was the first and last public display of a nuclear bomb. Seven lives had been lost, a Sailor seriously injured, and two aircraft destroyed, but after 80 days the sea had surrendered her prize.
1. Allen Lutins, "Nuclear Accidents," http://www.lutins.org/nukes.html, 17 November 2004.
2. Randall C. Maydew, America's Lost H-Bomb! Palomares, Spain, 1966, (Manhattan, KS: Sunflower University Press, 1997), pp. 2-11.
3. Ibid, p. 5
4. Ibid, p. 11.
5. Yvonne Zanos, "'66 H-bomb Accident Still a Concern in Spain," Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 29 November 2003.
6. Teresa Vilaros, "The Lightness of Terror: Palomares 1966," Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, July 2004.
7. John Pina Craven, The Silent War: The Cold War Battle Beneath the Sea, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), pp. 163-4.
8. Sherry Sontag, Christopher Drew, and Annette Lawrence Drew, Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage (New York: Perseus Book Group, 1998), pp. 58-60.
9. Maydew, pp. 55-59.
10. Center for Defense Information, The Defense Monitor, 1981, Vol. X, No. 5.
11. Maydew, p. 88.
12. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Obituary, "In Memoriam: Marvin McCamis," 10 October 2004.
13. Maydew, p. 96.
14. Paul Stillwell, The Reminisences of Master Chief Boatswain Mate Carl M. Brashear (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1998).
15. Douglas J. Neilson, "A Tale of Two Subs," http://ono.ucsd.edu/neilson1/pages/curv
16. Maydew, p. 107.